Kanwaljit Singh is Founder of Fireside Ventures, a fund focused on building consumer brands in India. This is an excellent conversation about the nascent opportunity that, I expect, will be a major, worldwide phenomenon in the coming years.
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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Don Hutchison was recorded in October 2017.
Don Hutchison is one of the most experienced and long-term Angel investors in Silicon Valley. We discuss the trends of the industry and ways to mitigate the Series A gap that is a serious issue right now.
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with David Blumberg, Blumberg Capital was recorded in September 2016.
David Blumberg, Founder and Managing Partner of Blumberg Capital, has been in the business for a long time, and we had a very interesting chat about the evolution of the venture business over the last 15 years. We also discussed some areas where there are opportunities to build new scalable businesses.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with your read of how the venture capital industry that we’ve been swimming in for
Sramana Mitra: How are the entrepreneurs receiving this alternate thinking?
Bryce Roberts: There’re two trains of thought. In the predominant Silicon Valley culture, the response tends to be, “Why would we do that?” They’re very indoctrinated into the idea of selling equity and getting on that successive round of funding to ratchet up the valuation.
We peg a lot of our ambition to the dollars we raise, the frequency we raise them, and who we raise them from. In our world, it’s like speed dating when I speak English and everybody else speaks Russian. It’s totally lost in translation. But then there’s a large and growing audience of people who really don’t want outside investors, but they could move much more quickly if they had access to capital. >>>
Sramana Mitra: What denomination do you invest in and what stage? What do you require to see to want to invest?
Bryce Roberts: For the first batch of companies we did, we had a pretty broad mandate. We were trying to figure out for whom this type of network and this type of resources made the most effect. We called that version one. In this version two, we’re looking for a minimum of $10,000 a month in revenue.
Companies that were coming from a standing start just didn’t make the same progress. They tended to fall back on the notion of fundraising early on. We want to find companies that have shown some real traction and that they’ve been able to attract >>>
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
Sramana Mitra: It’s a very particular and very narrow niche. The problem is that every entrepreneur somehow has been told that VC financing is entrepreneurship success. That’s a myth that’s dominating the entrepreneurship business.
For 10 years, we’ve been trying to debunk that myth. We have celebrated bootstrapped entrepreneurs and reasonable growth consistently for many years. Tell us a bit about what you’re doing with Indie.vc. What is the model and how have you structured the program?
Bryce Roberts: We’re creating more options for entrepreneurs than just the unicorn path. In seed investing and in early stage >>>
Utsav Somani, Angel Investor at AngelList India, talks about the newly launched AngelList India.
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